


things we found on our way

by lyres



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Developing Relationship, Emotional Catharsis Speedrun, F/F, Mutual Pining, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23534068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyres/pseuds/lyres
Summary: “Hey, would you like to DJ?” Cosette says after flicking one-handed through Top 40 stations for a while, keeping her left hand on the wheel.Éponine isn't entirely confident she can put together a playlist fitting the occasion. “Sure,” she says nonetheless, and reaches for her phone. Her chats are muted: it's not like she has answers for anyone wanting to know what the hell is going on, anyway.She opens Spotify. New playlist: Abducted By My Crush. First song: Olivia Newton-John, Hopelessly Devoted to You.(In which a conversation about her past leads Cosette to get into a car and head south - and to drag along Éponine, who only marginally signed up for all this.)
Relationships: Cosette Fauchelevent/Éponine Thénardier
Comments: 16
Kudos: 70





	things we found on our way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laurore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurore/gifts).



> Title from [Forests](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO1qVjbp_Rw) by Tom Rosenthal.

This was a mistake. Éponine knew the moment Cosette called at 5am that she was about to make a mistake. Éponine is a cautious person: by history, by experience, by nature. She understands her instincts and she listens to them, because listening to them has saved her before, and she knows that whatever derogatory tone people take when they say the words “gut feeling” is never justified. Gut feelings aren't esoteric impulses to be dismissed when counterweighted by logic, they are an amalgamation of carefully honed mechanisms of self-protection.

Her gut feeling, this morning at 5am, told Éponine not to get into a car with Cosette to accompany her on a spur-of-the-moment drive with no destination. It told her not to pack “for a couple days; we'll find somewhere for laundry.” It told her to please, oh, for the love of God, not fall for the excitement in Cosette's voice when she reminded Éponine that “We always _said_ we'd go on a road trip some time, remember?”

Sometimes, Éponine supposes as she glances at Cosette from the passenger's seat, ignoring those instincts carefully honed by years of mistreatment can be... healthy, perhaps. Therapeutic. Who knows? Maybe all she's doing is letting go of paranoia.

Cosette's hair is held back from her face by a flowery headband; she's wearing glasses, not contacts. The window is rolled down a little bit – during the first three hours of their drive, the sun has climbed high, and in the car, they didn't benefit from the still-cool spring air. The cut of wind would bother Éponine, but Cosette doesn't seem to mind.

“Hey, would you like to DJ?” Cosette says after flicking one-handed through Top 40 stations for a while, keeping her left hand on the wheel.

Éponine knows what music Cosette likes. More or less. (Musical Theatre; Pop; that really weird brand of upbeat acoustic, you know, the type with quirky lyrics about produce and hummus and such.) She's not entirely confident she can put together a playlist fitting the occasion. “Sure,” she says, and reaches for her phone. Her chats are muted: it's not like she has answers for anyone wanting to know what the hell is going on, anyway.

She opens Spotify. New playlist: Abducted By My Crush. First song: Olivia Newton-John, Hopelessly Devoted to You.

They stop for gas and lunch somewhere between Beaune and Mâcon, and Cosette insists on taking up one of the ancient picnic tables at the rest stop, rotting wood and all. “Getting crumbs all over our car seats isn't a meal,” she says, and pulls bento boxes from her backpack. “This lunch took me an hour to make and deserves better than that, if I do say so myself.”

Éponine says nothing. She stares at the lunchbox before her, then at Cosette, and keeps down several reactions at once.

There are sandwiches in the lunchbox (healthy ones, with microgreens and bean dip), and cucumber slices with shapes cut out and filled with carrot coins. There are chocolate cornflake clusters, too, impeccably stacked into cupcake liners. More thought has gone into the preparation of this lunch than into literally any other practical part of the impromptu road trip they are currently on. Cosette blinks at the sun and turns to sit sideways on the bench. Éponine takes a cucumber-slice-cum-carrot-coin.

“Maybe I should be driving the next lap.”

Cosette turns to her, lifting a hand to shielf wide eyes from the sun. “Do you have a license? I'm sorry, I just assumed.”

“Assumed right,” says Éponine. Her parents, even if they'd wanted to, could never have afforded driving school for her, and once she had her own income, it wasn't exactly a priority. “I can drive, though. I learned when Gavroche got into school.”

“Oh.” Cosette looks surprised, then decisive. “No, I don't mind driving. I like it, really.”

“Are you sure you're –” It strikes Éponine that she doesn't know how to say “of sound mind” without sounding like a dick. “You're not tired or anything?”

“No,” says Cosette. She's turning her half-eaten sandwich in her hands. “Not at all.”

Holding in a sigh, Éponine settles to make one final attempt. “You've told him you're safe, at least, right? He's not going to report you missing?”

She sees Cosette swallow.

Good God.

“I don't want him to worry.” Cosette's voice is a little rough, like it's pushing something else down and groaning with the effort. “I said I was with you, that I needed some time to myself. I'm not angry with him.” A pause, too abrupt, then: “I don't want to be angry with him.”

Éponine looks up. It's the sunniest day they've had this year, not a cloud in sight. She thinks about the friends Cosette has: friends they have in common, friends they don't, friends who have money, friends who have driver's licences, friends who would have talked her out of getting into a car and mindlessly driving so shortly after having her whole world turned upside down, friends who would have asked the right questions, friends who, surely, know the words that would comfort her.

She didn't go to any of those. If Éponine ever was anyone's first choice before, she doesn't remember.

“Cosette,” she says as the wind whips her hair about her face, “where are we going?”

Across the picnic table, Cosette wipes a hand over her eyes. “I don't know,” she says. “South.”

When she haphazardly tossed clean shirts and underwear into her duffle bag this morning, Éponine was admittedly sure Cosette would change her mind about the trip before the day was out. By the time they check in to a roadside hotel for the night, Éponine is prepared to admit that she did Cosette's determination a disservice. Not that it makes a difference. It's the weekend, and if they'll still be on the road in two days time, well. Éponine is a – _student_ , now. Azelma is taken care of; Gavroche is at school. It doesn't matter if she disappears for a few days. Students go on spontaneous road trips. Students blow all their money on a flight to Rome. It's fine.

“I was thinking we could head for the coast tomorrow,” says Cosette. She's bought a road map at the rest stop and has it spread out between them on the double bed on which they're sitting to eat their dinner – more sandwiches; a few apples. “If you like. I've heard the Atlantic coast down here is beautiful, and there won't be too much foot traffic, since we're travelling out of season.”

“Sure.” Éponine chews on her lips. She says, “I've never seen the sea.”

“Oh!”

Cosette's surprise is always good-natured. Éponine finds anything else difficult to stomach; the pity, the awkwardness, the reproach. She knows Cosette never _forgets_ about Éponine's sad excuse for a childhood, anyway, and that helps. Cosette isn't surprised she's never seen the sea. Cosette is –

“That'll make it even more special, then.” Cosette taps what looks, to Éponine, like a random town at the seaside all the way down on the map, almost in Spain. “We'll have to pick the right spot so it'll all be perfect.”

In spite of herself, Éponine laughs. “Perfect?”

“Of course! It's not every day you get to show someone the sea for the first time. We can't have you just catch a glimpse of it as we're driving along the coast; that won't do. I'll find us a route.”

Later, after they've turned out the lights, Éponine lies on her side and tries to quiet her mind. She should be so good at this by now. Years of therapy, at this point, along with plenty of training in methods of relaxation – the fatal flaw being, of course, that most of those techniques assume you're trying to relax because your anxiety has no real rationale. Éponine's current anxiety strikes her as entirely appropriate for the situation that is lying inches away from the girl you're awfully, horribly, misguidedly in love with.

What a rotten thing to think about, too. Like her nagging little feelings have any right at pretensions to even the slightest importance. The important questions are so much bigger, so much more stark and brutal and ungenerous, that Éponine circles back time and time again to the least important thing.

_Why did she ask me?_

Her mind is quick to provide answers, and they burrow and fester and keep her awake.

_She's at her worst, and she can't stand anyone seeing her that way who isn't even worse._

_She's doing something harmful and impulsive, and you're the only person she knows who wouldn't have the sense to stop her._

_She wouldn't ask anyone with real commitments to drop everything and run away._

_You'd not deny her anything, would you, and she knows_.

“Hey.” She has said it into the dark quicker than her mind could have allowed.

Next to her, Cosette makes a soft humming noise that wraps like a vice around Éponine's chest.

“Will you tell me?” she asks, one of the big questions, because she's begun to understand that the small one will keep her awake if the big ones don't. “What he said?”

Cosette is quiet for a long time.

The blanket rustles – they're sharing, and Cosette said earlier that she tended to hog sheets, but she hasn't, so far; she was deliberate, even, in making sure she got the shorter end of the duvet – and Éponine feels a hand on her shoulder, the slightest brush of fingers.

She turns.

Cosette is looking at her; she can feel rather than see it. They lie inches apart, the silence a flimsy barrier between them.

Earlier, Éponine stumbled over something. It felt clumsy and strange, the act of undressing in the same room; there was still a choreography to it, a half-turning away and a played nonchalance when a shirt was stripped off. It's always felt off to Éponine, this generalised assumption that all girls would feel natural and happy changing around each other. The few times she stayed in a school long enough to learn the names of other girls, she avoided sharing changing rooms with them, and that was that. She didn't like the idea of anyone seeing her body, but far more than that, her own quiet urge to _look_ frightened her, and that it would be easy to ignore or could not even exist didn't seem to her like a natural assumption at all.

Cosette is different in two ways: Éponine wants to be seen by her; and Éponine wants desperately, for the first time that she remembers, to forgive herself for wanting to see.

“I'm sorry,” says Cosette. Her voice is hoarse. She sang along earlier, to Gene Kelly and Louane and Mika. “I've been so selfish all day.”

Éponine thinks that Cosette can really fucking afford to be selfish for once, and murmurs something noncommittal.

“I knew he'd been to prison. I knew. I wasn't angry about that. I always cared about how ashamed he was – that he wouldn't tell _me_ , me out of everyone else. But I got it wrong, because of course he couldn't tell me. He couldn't because – because I mattered the most.”

Éponine nods. She doesn't need to remind Cosette that her father loves her. No one needs to remind her of that. Worse, still: if she weren't so painfully aware of it, they wouldn't be here right now, miles away from Paris in the hopes that distance might lighten the weight of love.

“But my mother.”

The last word is full of past. Éponine says nothing.

“It wasn't his story to keep from me. It's not his story at all. For himself, he felt shame, and I won't blame him for that, but for her – ” She stumbles over a crack in her voice. “I wish I'd always known. I wish I didn't have to feel this now.”

“What do you feel?”

“I think –” Cosette stops. She breathes out. “I'm afraid.”

“Of what?”

“I feel like I've lost something. I feel like a child again, like I haven't grown up at all. Does that make any sense? When I didn't know, when I thought I could never know, she was whatever I wanted her to be in my mind, and she felt like my mother. She was – I hate this, and I know it's stupid and childish, but she was an image, abstract and safe, like a guardian angel. And now I know where she was from, and what – what she went through, what she did for me, now I actually know who she was, and suddenly I feel – it's like I'm picturing a stranger when I think of her.”

 _I understand that_ , Éponine thinks. To say it would feel insulting. Does she understand? Can anyone?

Éponine doesn't know if her mother loved her. She did, probably; she loved her and Azelma, at least, but not enough to protect them. Cosette sounds like she's talking about sacrifice – about shouldering the weight of someone else's for you – and that's something Éponine can't understand.

“Where was she from?”

A shaky breath in. “Algiers.”

“...Cosette, are we driving to Gibraltar?”

It breaks a dam. Cosette snorts, and it turns into an odd spell of prolonged giggling, and then she's crying, and Éponine edges the slightest bit closer and Cosette presses her face into Éponine's shirt. Her shoulders shake. Éponine murmurs things to her, quiet and steady, and she lets a hand curl against the back of her head.

“No,” whispers Cosette eventually. She takes a deep breath, but doesn't lift her head from where it's pressed to Éponine's collarbone. “No, we're driving you to the sea.”

When Cosette finally quiets, when the frame in Éponine's arms stops shaking, it is because she's fallen asleep. Éponine can't dare to move, and so she sleeps close, fitful and uneasy, with Cosette curled into the hollow between her arms and chest.

Their route is a joke. For all that Éponine can tell, it's complete nonsense. They were driving southwards yesterday, for hours and hours, and still didn't make it further than Valence, and now they're driving west, because Cosette says the western coast has the better ocean.

“Trust me,” she says, eyes firmly on the road. She doesn't like to drive fast, which is probably a good thing, because she likes to get distracted. “The South, capital S, it's all palm trees and rich tourists and sandy beaches. Unsurprising. Conventional. We need to find you some rocks to climb over.”

“Right.” Éponine is making a new playlist, for a less aimless sort of day. The thing that had been quietly seething beneath Cosette's surface was gone this morning, and in its place is an impatient sort of giddiness. Yesterday's songs were painting over something; today, they get to put into sound the lightness that seems to follow Cosette where she goes.

They get stuck in traffic halfway to the coast. It's a Saturday morning and the first warm weekend in spring. Éponine rolls back her seat and stretches out her legs. Cosette has dug some stationery out of her backpack and stuck a post-it note to Éponine's forehead, and Éponine is looking down at an empty sticky note herself. “Okay,” she says finally, and writes. Cosette pulls her headband back and Éponine brushes her thumb across the sticky line of the note to test that it holds, pressed close against Cosette's skin.

“You first.”

Éponine blinks up at the note, like that's going to help. “Am I alive?”

“Yes. Am I... misrepresented in history?”

“What? Um. Yes? Probably. Am I famous?”

“Not as famous as you should be, baby.”

“That tells me nothing.”

A smile. “Tough. Am I cute?”

Traffic remains at a standstill and Cosette's outrageously irrelevant questions, which should by all accounts be useless, lead her to guess Jeanne d'Arc in record time. Éponine is less lucky. She is, so far, alive, not fictional, under fifty, neither politician, nor musician, nor otherwise in the public eye, and also at her wit's end. She took a page out of Cosette's playbook in her frustration, and learned that she is also intelligent, attractive, and well-liked.

“Do I know me? Personally?”

“Yes!”

“Ah. See, we didn't discuss if that was allowed.”

Cosette's expression can't be described as anything other than devious. “That's right, we didn't.”

“Right.” Éponine bites her lip in concentration, then catches herself doing it and stops. “Do I like me?”

Something happens to Cosette's face. “I... Well,” she says, “that's – hm. I can't answer that with a yes or no.”

“That hasn't stopped you before.”

“True.” Cosette gives a determined nod. “I hope so. Is my answer.”

“Right.” Éponine has an odd thought, tries to dismiss it, and can't. “Am I _you_?”

“What?” For a moment, Cosette looks genuinely puzzled. Then, she laughs. “No! Which part of – God, but that would have been some self-laudation to die for. I wish I was at that level of unabashed confidence right now. It's not me.” Her smile softens and she shakes her head. “You'd say that, though. 'Course you would.”

“That's really not helping,” says Éponine, now more lost than ever. She shoots for her next most likely option. “Am I Combeferre?”

“For the love of –”

Cosette reaches out, too quickly for Éponine to stop her, and plucks the sticky note from her forehead to show her. Written in capital letters on neon pink paper is Éponine's own name.

Éponine's mind stalls. It runs through the questions she asked, the answers she received, and fails to connect the dots. When she comes back to herself enough to look at Cosette, Cosette is frowning.

“Sorry, I didn't mean –”

“Movement,” says Éponine as a two-tonne weight is lifted off her chest. She points forward to where, three cars ahead, the line has started moving. “Finally.”

They approach the coast mid-afternoon, the closeness of their approach only being made known to Éponine when Cosette shouts, suddenly and over a turned-up pop song, “Close your eyes!”

The urgency in her voice has Éponine obey before she can make sense of the request.

“Sorry,” adds Cosette, with no small amount of satisfaction in her tone. “Glimpses of the sea will spoil the experience. I can see it from my window, right now.”

“Am I going to have to keep them closed until we're there?”

“Yes,” says Cosette. She is entirely serious. “It's not far.”

It isn't: A few bends in the road (which had been getting ever narrower the further they drove), a noticeable climb, and Cosette lets them roll out and cuts the engine.

“Don't open your eyes yet,” she says quickly. “I'll tell you when.” Éponine hears her open the door; the door next to her opens moments later, and Cosette takes her hand to help her out.

“I'll have you know that you're raising impossible expectations with this,” she informs Cosette as they walk along what must be a gravel path, Éponine cautious and unsure on every step.

Cosette only draws closer to her, still holding on to her hand, and says, “We'll see.”

The air smells different. It's not salt, like Éponine expected; the smell makes her think of summer and nori and, by some perverse suggestion, fresh yeast. Up here, the wind is chilly despite the warmth of sunlight on her face, and Éponine feels parts of herself growing numb during their walk. (Not her hand: clasped together, both their palms stay warm.) After a while, having her eyes closed stops feeling strange: it's nice to be guided like this, surely and with purpose.

As she thinks it, Cosette stops. Their walk was a slight ascent, and they must be high up now; the wind has become louder, muddled and cut through by the calls of gulls.

“Okay.” Cosette lets go of her hand. “You can look.”

The first thing Éponine sees is white – her eyes have been closed for a while, and the fast wind has driven away any clouds above them. The sun is startlingly bright.

She blinks as her eyes become used to the light. Slowly, the world before her aligns into a golden ratio of blues. Cosette must be right: this is the better ocean. She's not seen any other, but the darkness of the water – dark grey, deep and awful and crowned with white – and the growl of waves beneath as they break on the cliff's foot must be inimitable. There is, among the awe, a brief moment where she's horrified, but it disappears so quickly she can't trace it. This is the sea, then: vast and dark and the most beautiful thing Éponine has ever seen.

They are standing on a cliff's edge, the rock beneath them has a sandy colour, and out of the corner of her eye, Éponine thinks she sees a lighthouse she can't bring herself to look away from the sea for. When she turns her head, it is to look at Cosette, herself lost in the view. Éponine thinks her eyes look wet, but the wind stings, and she doesn't know how to break the silence.

“I used to think you could see the earth curve, here,” says Cosette. Her voice fights a hopeless battle against the wind. “Sometimes I still tell myself I can.”

They walk along the edge of the rocks. Éponine finds it difficult to look anywhere but the sea, and after Cosette has twice pulled her violently back onto the path after Éponine neglected to watch where she was going and wandered too close to the edge, they link arms.

“So,” says Éponine when they pause below the lighthouse. There's some shelter from the wind, here, and Éponine can look along the coast, uneven like a hard, scribbled line which keeps the ocean contained. “Are you going to tell me where you were really going to drive?”

Cosette shifts on her feet. She gives Éponine an annoyed look, the sort that isn't cause for concern because it utterly fails to convey anything but fondness. “Toulon,” she says. “He's from Faverolles, you know? In Aisne. But they took him down there.”

“Oh.” Éponine isn't sure what she expected, but this isn't quite it. Is it her father she's been trying to understand better after all? There doesn't have to be any logic to it, Éponine reminds herself. She's lost things, gradually and without reprieve, but she's never been uprooted overnight. In all likelihood, Cosette herself isn't sure what she's looking for. “Do you still want to go?”

“I don't think I wanted to go then. He'd be so hurt by me seeking that place out. I was... I might have been trying to hurt him.” The admission was lodged deep, and having brought it out so suddenly feels violent. Éponine looks away from her. “I don't know what I need, really, but I know it's not that. By the time I noticed that, I figured we might as well get a good view out of my pigheadedness.”

“Cosette.”

“No, I'm – it's fine. I can forgive myself for this.” She smiles, quick and unexpected. “If you can, I mean.”

“There's nothing to forgive. I would have gone all the way to Algiers with you.”

Cosette gives her an odd look. Éponine can't let it stand.

“Cosette, you're so goddamn kind.” She shakes her head. “This is your idea of a serious offence. You had the rug pulled from under you, you had to re-learn everything you thought was true about where you came from in the space of one conversation, you've had the trauma of someone who loved you pushed onto your shoulders overnight, and your response is to pay for enough gas to get us to the coast and then feel bad about it. I can't even think of a more selfless way to react to a blow like that, I mean, Christ, give yourself a break. And don't – think about apologising again, please. This was nothing. You're allowed to feel.”

Cosette watched her as she talked, and as she did, her frown unfurled gently into a smile. “Okay,” she says.

“Okay?”

“Okay. I'll say thank you, then. Instead of sorry. Thank you for being here with me.”

It strikes Éponine that maybe her unimportant question really isn't unimportant at all. Not anymore, at least, not now that all the bigger ones have been asked, and she's already followed Cosette blindly across half the country and up a hill at a cliff's edge, so there's no real risk, is there, in putting this into her hands as well.

“Why did you call me, anyway?” It's already come out wrong, and Éponine bites her tongue. “I mean, why – how come you didn't ask anyone else?”

Cosette's lips part. She makes a soft sound of disbelief and says, shaking her head, “Who else? You're the best person I know.”

Not far from them is a twenty-metre drop into a swirl of white and grey. The rush of wind pulls at their jackets, and Éponine moves to make her body a shield, to have the wind in her back and Cosette before her. In the shade of the lighthouse, Cosette wraps her arms around Éponine's shoulders and holds on tightly enough to hurt.

They stay at a bed and breakfast in town: old-fashioned, oppressively close quarters, a hostess in her mid-70s, bedsheets with the smallest floral pattern. Last night, after dinner, Cosette stood on the house's balcony while speaking on the phone to her father, and Éponine lay on top of the comforter in their room trying to slow down time. When Cosette returned, her smile watery and her eyes bright, she decided that it was no use at all: the present, as it was, was just fine.

Cosette sleeps like the dead. She wraps her hair in a scarf to sleep, and it's come loose at some point during the night, black curls spilling out from satin. It takes Éponine a few moments and several repressed impulses to turn away to remember that she's allowed to do this: to reach out and brush Cosette's curls back beneath the fabric, to gently run a finger across her forehead. Before that, to look – to see.

Éponine turns on her back and closes her eyes. Something brims behind her eyelids, and she's determined to keep her mood up for today. Two days of being incautious, and she knows her time is running out, but there must be joy in having had this, too, and she won't allow herself to forget that. Even if it goes away; even if she'll look back on these two days as on one of her more pitiful dreams, the sort she wakes up from to feel lonelier than before. Even then. For now, it's still real.

“I wanted to say.” Cosette's voice finds her, an anchor that makes her turn her head, even if she can't yet trust herself to look. “I stopped feeling sure of things, the night before yesterday. It shouldn't have unmoored me, but it did. I didn't feel certain about anything.” Her hand finds Éponine's, as natural as anything. “Just this.”

Éponine listens to her own breath. She feels the warmth of a palm in hers, the weight of it, close and sure, and remembers, instead of what she's been telling herself – each vicious, whispering doubt – what Cosette has said to her, now and before.

She opens her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> For [laurore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurore) / [ferrame](https://ferrame.tumblr.com), who was kind enough to prompt exactly what I suspect many of us need right now: a vicarious roadtrip. I hope you've enjoyed reading! I'm [lesamis](https://lesamis.tumblr.com) on tumblr; come talk seascapes with me. 
> 
> Cosette and Éponine drive from Paris to Valence via Auxerre and Lyon, and then make a sharp turn west to Biarritz by the Spanish border. Like there aren't rich tourists and sandy beaches there, too, Cosette. We all know you were just going in for a longer drive w/ the girl you love.


End file.
